Over a year ago, I had a brief post here pointing out Gene Weingarten‘s article in the Washington Post entitled “Pearls before breakfast“, in which the Post asked the question of what would happen if a world-class musician (in this case, Joshua Bell), were to perform incognito and out of context, in a Washington subway during the morning rush hour? If you haven’t yet read the article describing the experiment and the outcome, I recommend it to you.

[Actually, this article was highly atypical for Gene; he usually sticks to writing a weekly low-brow humour column entitled “Below the Beltway”. By a random coincidence, I, together with Curt McMullen, even have a very minor bit part in one of these columns (on page 2), thanks to a brief phone conversation we each had with Gene.]

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